Tiny fish swim beside the dugout canoes that residents use to escape their flooded homes, riding the water gushing through the streets of Soroti, an eastern Uganda town.
Across Africa, torrential downpours and flash floods have submerged whole towns and washed away bridges, farms and schools.
More than a million people across at least 17 countries have been affected by the rains since the summer, according to the United Nations. At least 200 people have been killed, and hundreds of thousands are displaced.
In Uganda, one of the hardest-hit countries, humanitarian workers are trying to reach villages that have been cut off by water amid warnings of food crises and the rising risk of disease outbreaks.
”It’s a beautiful day today but we don’t know what tomorrow brings,” World Food Programme country director Tesema Negash told the Associate Press on Wednesday under a clear sky in eastern Uganda. ”Our immediate focus is food, and then shelter.”
In eastern Uganda, nine people have been reported killed and 150 000 have been made homeless since early August. Another 300 000 — mainly subsistence farmers — have lost their livelihoods after their fields were flooded or roads washed away, and the rains are forecast to worsen in the next month.
The water has brought much of Soroti, about 325km from the capital, Kampala, to a standstill. When the town is dry, the roads are potholed but passable — bicycles and buses are the best way to get around — and crops of maize and cotton dot the landscape.
But the floods have washed out roads and crops during a potentially lucrative harvest season. Traffic police are stationed along high roads, urging vehicles to turn back. Bicycles are drenched in sticky mud.
Other affected countries include Somalia, which is struggling to quell a bloody insurgency and to recover from a seemingly endless cycle of drought and flood.
Somali Interior Minister Mohamed Mohamud Guled said this week that southern Somalia faced a ”humanitarian catastrophe” because rivers had burst their banks, flooding farms and destroying crops. The rivers began flooding in late August following heavy rains in neighbouring Ethiopia, Guled said.
On the other side of the continent, Ghana in West Africa has also been heavily hit.
Three regions in the north, the country’s traditional breadbasket, have been declared an official disaster zone after whole towns and villages were submerged. Torrential rains between July and August killed at least 32 people and displaced a quarter of a million, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday. — Sapa-AP